Former United States president George W
Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein before
bombing and invading Iraq.

Nine years
later, US President Barack Obama has issued an
ultimatum to the leadership in Tehran before ...
setting optimal conditions for an "all options on
the table" exercise.

Obama has made an
offer to Tehran to "negotiate" its nuclear program
- ahead of long-delayed talks between the "Iran
Six" (P5+1 - the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council - the US, the United Kingdom,
China, Russia and France - plus Germany) and Iran
scheduled for Istanbul on Saturday.

For
starters, it's not an offer; it's a list of
demands - even before

any negotiation takes
place. And these "near term" concessions are
packaged - according to the president's own
rhetoric - as a "last chance".

In modern
times, this used to be known as an ultimatum. In
the post-everything era, it passes for
"international diplomacy".

Obama wants
Tehran to shut down and in fact destroy the Fordow
enrichment plant, built under a mountain outside
the holy city of Qom; he wants Tehran to
definitely renounce and "surrender" its entire
stockpile of uranium enriched to 20%; to stop any
sort of enrichment, even to harmless 5% (which
means Iran renouncing its whole civilian nuclear
program, to which it has a right according to the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ); to allow
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
inspectors full access to all Iranian nuclear
sites (they already have it); and to let the
inspectors talk to all top Iranian nuclear
scientists (that's not exactly possible; quite a
few have been assassinated by Israel's Mossad).

So welcome to the "roll over and die"
school of diplomacy - as perfected by the Obama
administration, with vital input from the Israel
lobby in Washington. It's our way of the highway.
And the highway is to hell - to the sound of "Bomb
Bomb Iran".

Another war for the
1%No wonder the proverbial "Israeli
officials" are delighted that Iran - via its
Foreign Ministry - has rejected all these demands
as "irrational"; for Tel Aviv, the Iranian
response is "good".

"Good" means the list
of demands spells out the inevitable failure of
the talks - which is the core of the Israeli
strategy. Afterwards Obama may (will) use the
failure as the perfect excuse to apply even
harsher sanctions - and who knows what else.

The whole Israeli official apparatus for
months have been brainwashing Israeli, American
and European public opinion for war on Iran by all
means necessary - manipulating everything from a
nonsensical "existential threat" to the coming of
a "second Holocaust".

Now the whole Fordow
controversy is linked to the Israeli spin of
another shady concept - known as "sphere of
immunity". Tel Aviv insists Fordow will allow
Tehran to protect the more sensitive elements of
its nuclear program literally inside a mountain -
immune from the most powerful GBU-28 bunker buster
bombs (which Obama, by the way, agreed to sell to
Israel).

This is absolutely nonsense. Tel
Aviv invented this "sphere of immunity"
smokescreen after civilian nuclear activity was
already taking place in Fordow, under IAEA
supervision.

Yet the tail once again wags
the dog. Washington once again is
remote-controlled by Tel Aviv.

Polls have
shown that a majority of Israelis - in a fabulous
display of ... altruism? - only want a war on Iran
if the American Big Brother leads (and faces the
direst consequences). And it doesn't matter that
the nebula of Israeli intel is itself divided.

Context is key. The wealthiest 500
Israelis are worth roughly $75 billion. That in a
country with a gross domestic product of only $205
billion.

The wealthiest 20 Israeli
families control almost half of the stock market.
Their collective wealth is 25% bigger than
Israel's budget for 2011. And guess who these
people are? The top supporters of the Likud-Ysrael
Beitenu coalition in power, with Prime Minister
Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu at the helm (Ysrael
Beitenu is led by former Moldova bouncer turned
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman).

So
it's the cream of the 1% in Israel that want war
on Iran - as much as quite a few scoops of the
cream of the 1% in the US.

The point in
this whole nuclear "negotiation" shadow play is to
sell to American - and world - public opinion the
notion that Iran once again is stalling; has a lot
to hide; and simply cannot be trusted to be
engaged in any "serious" negotiations.

US
corporate media has already pre-empted the
negotiations with the usual rhetorical missiles -
to the delight of armchair warmongers in the US
Congress and vast sectors of the
industrial-military complex. The "Bomb Iran" crowd
will do everything in its power to merge Obama's
"last chance" into the deafening drums of war.